Monday, May 5, 2008

Hyper-V, HyperV, HyperADD, whatever

So, after the Microsoft "Heroes Happen Here" launch event, I'm playing around with my copies of software. I've got all new hardware for a dedicated HyperV machine as my main lab setup and I'm experimenting with setting up a new infrastructure with PKI, IPSec, AD Services, Exchange, etc.

Here are some Hyper-V specific notes:

- Emulated hosts are SLOW. Holy cow! I can't believe how slow hosts are on this platform before installing the Integration Services (VMware addons equiv.) It is BY FAR slower than VMWare ESX, VMWare Server, or Virtual Server 2005R2 without the addons. After installation the performance is great, but it took me hours to get a 2003 host setup and patched before that installation, since the minimum requirements are somewhat steep for the guest OS to support the IS software. This is disappointing.

- Most annoying "quirk" sofar: When you create a fixed size disk, which is what I prefer to do for performance reasons, all related activity on that set of drives STOPS. Guests that rely on that drive set will nearly lock up until the completion of the disk is completed. This is byfar the most annoying thing I've seen sofar. It's not a low performance I/O setup I've got here; An adaptec 3405 SAS/SATA RAID card with 4x WD 5000KCS drives in a RAID 5EE array. I realize it's not enterprise class, but it should be well enough to do two things at once. The creation routine for the fixed disk is far to agressive with I/O in my opinion.

This whole post is a touch light on details. I'll add more later.

Edit: Add..

Another annoying quirk; Since the addons that shipped with Win2k8 were a beta, the RC0 addons are not fully compatible. Because of that, they don't work until you manually update them with this update: http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyId=DDD94DDA-9D31-4E6D-88A0-1939DE3E9898&displaylang=en